Weekend tech reading: Portal 2 developer interviewed

Portal 2: 'We didn't want to deliver a half-assed experience' Portal 2 marks the return of Valve's first-person thinker, bringing with it sardonic mainframe GLaDOS and portal-popping Chell, along with more fiendish puzzles than you can shake a Companion Cube at. It also introduces one of the most compulsive co-op experiences available today...We flew to Valve's HQ in Seattle to talk to programmer Jeep Barnett about Steamworks, Left 4 Dead PS3 and groundbreaking tech. CVG

56% of Americans have Internet data caps; FCC asked to investigate Two prominent Washington DC tech policy groups have asked the Federal Communications Commission to investigate Internet data caps in the US—with a special focus on AT&T. New America Foundation and Public Knowledge say in a letter (PDF) that data caps aren't necessarily a problem, but that they do “carry the omnipresent temptation to act in anticompetitive monopolistic ways.” Ars Technica

‘Do not track’ privacy bill appears in Congress And the privacy legislation just keeps on coming.On Friday, two bills were introduced in Washington in support of a Do Not Track mechanism that would give users control over how much of their data was collected by advertisers and other online companies. NY Times

MPAA has nothing on us, isoHunt tells court BitTorrent search engine isoHunt is fighting the injunction and summary judgment issued by the District Court of California last summer in their case against the MPAA. Yesterday, both parties clashed in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, with isoHunt claiming there is no evidence they can be held liable for copyright infringements that may have been committed by its users. TorrentFreak

8Realms: 'We can challenge Total War and Civilization' So let us get this straight: A browser-based 'social' strategy title with the most 'complex front-end' of a commercial site in the world? One that can challenge Total War and Civilization from a gameplay standpoint yet can be "fired up during lunch to launch a few attacks"? Sounds a little bit too good to be true, right? CVG

Spurred by mobile, rethinking the wireless LAN It's the neglected stepchild of mobile: the wireless LAN. But businesses can't afford to continue that practice. It's time to rethink the wireless LAN not as a parallel network for casual use but as part of the core network, argues Andrew Borg, a mobile analyst at the Aberdeen Group. He has the numbers to back that up. InfoWorld

Evolution battle brews in Texas In Texas, a battle is brewing over the teaching of evolutionary theory, as the Board of Education considers a new set of instructional materials to be used in science classrooms. In several states there are laws or standards that allow educational authorities to add material that isn't in the textbooks to the curriculum... IBTimes

Source: Layoffs at Crytek Budapest, Kinect game moves foward An anonymous source told Gamasutra this week that Crysis developer Crytek will lay off 30-35 workers at its Budapest studio, which will purportedly switch from work on an Xbox 360-exclusive Kinect game to focus on tablet titles. Gamasutra

JavaScript creator talks about the future JavaScript is currently an important language - possibly the most important of all the languages at this point in time. So an impromptu talk at JSConf given by the creator of JavaScript, Brendan Eich, is not something to ignore. I-Programmer